i have proof that materialism is false

[Xflighenjoyer]

Well probably. The chance that materialism is true is exactly equal to the chance that a single universe has the right cosmological constants for life

 

[Caleb Valenzuela]

oh man i was expecting a 2 page paragraph on why materialism is false

 

[Xflighenjoyer]

The argument is as so: we can say that materialism is the position that there does not exist anything outside the material world, that all experience is matter, all behaviors are, there aren’t any spirits or any specialty to consciousness. If we define it as so, I claim that it has the same probability of being true that a single universe can host life, with arbitrary cosmological constants and the such. The universe seems to be fine tuned. There are three ways this could happen. 1. A god designed it such. 2. Complete random chance. 3. There are multiple universes and the one that can host consciousness is the one that will have consciousness [go to it]. 2 is very unlikely, and 1 & 3 are non-materialistic. A god is not matter, by definition of an agentic creator, would have to be before matter. 3 is non materialistic because any kind of other universes cannot interact by matter, by definition, so consciousness must transfer between, in order for it to select a universe, must by definition not interact through matter, and must be beyond it.

 

[Jorian Meeuse]

Is the number 1 material?

I believe materialism is rather short-sighted, but don't confuse 'disproving' materialism with proving God. It seems to me that God did a pretty good job making sure that the evidence for His existence is such that if you are open to it, you can see it quite literally everywhere, but if you are not, you will not see it anywhere.

If God exists then, there's the question of whether or not we can know anything about who God is. However, if we can't, then we can in particular not answer the question at hand definitively, because that would be knowing something about God. It follows that all we can do to answer this question is look around for any information about God, and if we find any, conclude that we indeed can know something about God. Of course, we will then no longer care about having answered that question, but rather about whatever it is we found out about God.

So let's look around. It seems safe to assume we could only hope to find something about God if He revealed it to us. There happen to be several sources that claim to bring or contain revelation from God. We cannot thoroughly investigate all, but we can reasonably assume that if any of these are 'true' in some sense, it would be one of the more well-known ones. Maybe all we find is falsehood, but we can try. The two biggest religions, Christianity and Islam, both claim Jesus in some sense, so He seems relevant to the discussion. As any historian will tell you, Jesus was a preacher in 1st century Judea and was crucified under Pontius Pilate. Soon after, His followers started proclaiming that they had seen the risen Jesus, and some were willing to die for this belief, meaning they likely truly believed this quite peculiar claim. Around 300 years later, 'Christianity', the religion that claims Jesus is the Christ (Messiah) that was promised in the Jewish scriptures, that He is God who became incarnate as a human being to die and rise from the death to bring about eternal life for those who believe in Him, became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the very empire that crucified Jesus.

Unfortunately, this presents some problems for Islam: According to Islam, Jesus was not crucified (Quran 4:157), and the Islamic view of Jesus (a prophet who preached belief in and obedience to one God and who gave us the Injil (gospels)) doesn't really account for the desire of the Jews to crucify Him. There is also not one person before Muhammad who claimed to follow Jesus but did so in the Islamic way, while the quran says the true followers of Jesus will be 'uppermost' (Quran 3:55 and 61:14). This, along with other quranic errors, like confusing Miriam (sister of Aaron) and Mary (mother of Jesus), claiming Islamic prophethood of Old Testament prophets whose names contain the divine name YHWH (which is certainly not one of the 99 names of Allah), or constantly confirming the Torah and the Gospel as inspired and preserved revelation from God even though they constantly contradict Islamic teaching, sheds some serious doubt on the divine origins of Islamic revelation.

As mentioned, Christianity teaches that Jesus is God incarnate and rose from the dead, which is a lot stronger than the Islamic claims about Jesus. But Jesus seems to have indeed claimed to be God, albeit not in the direct way that would have led to an immediate death sentence. He claims certain authorities, like forgiving sins or executing final judgement, and accepts worship which other people and even angels in the New Testament reject, because it is only due to God. Did Jesus rise from the dead, then? Well, the apostles who died for their faith probably weren't lying, at least. Especially Paul, who was a fervent persecutor of christians but became a prominent christian preacher and was killed for it in Rome, probably had a good reason for converting. And he happens to say this reason was an encounter with the risen Jesus. Now, that could have been a hallucination. But did multiple people all have such a hallucination?

I am, of course, not pretending to 'prove' Christianity in a few hundred words here. But maybe it'll make someone interested in investigating this more. And if anyone has questions about any of this, please do ask!

 

[Xflighenjoyer]

I was not trying to prove god

 

[Jorian Meeuse]

I was not trying to prove god

Apologies, I should have been clearer. I can see how I worded it a bit confusingly, but what I mean is that if you want to go the fine-tuning route, you should also try to 'prove' God's existence, because if you don't, there is (as you mentioned) the multiverse option, which so far is perfectly fine being material (sorry, I really cannot understand your argument why it is not). Fine-tuning alone is not enough for theism OR against materialism. So if you want to show that materialism is false from fine-tuning, you need to show either that a multiverse is necessarily non-materialistic (which I do not believe you can), or that some type of God exists. However, if you show that God exists, you already have shown that materialism is false, and no longer need to add fine-tuning to complete the argument. So for your purposes, you should either abandon fine-tuning, or come up with a valid argument why all multiverse models are non-materialistic.